The trip to 50/50

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I had the funny idea to spend my 50th birthday in N50, E50, which turns out to be in West Kazakhstan.

With my small motor home I started in Vienna, Austria, and soon found out that the trans-European road E50

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_route_E50) runs into that direction.

So across northern Slovakia passing by the High Tatra I went to Ukraine, crossed the East Carpathian mountains and headed for Lwiw.

When I wanted to cross over to the E40 towards Kiew I got on a secondary road and was for the first time taught how many potholes can fit onto a road. The lesson is to always follow the local people even if they drive slalom spanning both lanes.

Kiew did offer some surprises. First it is a big capital with plenty of gold-covered old churches.

In the north I visited Babyn Jar, the place of the massacre made famous by Yewtuschenko.

I was surprised to find that Chernobyl is just north of Kiew so I drove there and spent a quiet night on the banks of the Dnepr river.

But most impressive still was Kiew. There were military clashes at the eastern border, but the town seemed calm as always.

I knew from the news that there had been protests at the Maidan place a few months before, but only when I came there did I realize what that meant. There were street barricades made of paving stones, vigilants camping, flagpoles erected and people mourning the dead; this was the pride after a revolution.

Next I headed for the border to Russia. The roads there are drawn with a ruler into the landscape, straight till the horizon.

Of course, there were tensions between Russia an Ukraine and I did no know what to expect. I had to wait for six hours, I had to negotiate a car insurance, which then nobody asked for. My funny son, who did not approve of the trip to these seemingly dangerous areas, asked me to at least bring him an AK-47 as a present. So when I saw a young, armed border guard I had the chutzpah to approach him. What would he respond? "No problem! You can have that shit! I want peace!" Well, the ordinary people, even in uniform, often do not think what the politicians expect them to think. Finally an incredibly bored official stamped some papers and I could move on.

Next destination was Kursk, where everywhere they remind you that this was the place of a major battle in World War II.

Lenin still stands in front of government buildings, but McDonalds also has arrived. In the outskirts I come across a big German military cemetary.

Via Voronesh I move on to Saratov, which is already at the Volga.

Again impressive churches, again impressive imperial government buildings, again communist heritage such as a town named Engels.

Another statue to find here is that of Gagarin, the cosmonaut, because he touched down just south of the city.

There is a monument at that location and I shortly walked in his footsteps.

The small village of Smelowka nearby looks as it must have looked decades ago, old wooden houses along an unpaved road.

On the map I find a round lake, looks like a crater, so I head there. But it is the Elton salt lake, pink from the bacteria thriving there.

While I stand at the beach watching some smoke at the horizon a man approaches me and explains to me in perfect German that this is a nature reserve now and I must not stay. Turns out he is from the German minority which settled at the Volga centuries ago.

I want to go to Volgograd anyway and turn west.

It was to become one of the most unusual trips ever. What looks like a road on the map turns out to be nothing more than a dirt track for hundreds of kilometers. Also the landscape there is pure dry steppe, almost completely uninhabitated, I came across exactly a single car in many hours. But there are a few farmers trying to make a living. And they have a proven method to make the soil more fertile: They set the steppe on fire. So I found myself surrounded by fires, smoke walls in all directions till the horizon. Dangerous? Well, I looked at the height of the grass and calculated the energy the fire would find. Acceptable risk I concluded, but it happened that I had to drive through walls of fire crossing the road, not once, but ten times.

Surprisingly I saw a building appear in the middle of nowhere. It turned out to be a huge military radar station. I guessed that there might be a better road there, on the other hand I might get jailed maybe. I headed there and was right: There was a concrete road. For 500 meters and then the dirt track again. I met no one, continued and finally arrived at the banks of the Volga near Volgograd.

I walked around the rebuilt town and the next day visited the museum of the battle of Stalingrad as it was called then. Learning about the fierce, desperate fighting was so depressing that I soon left to move on.

I was eager not to drive through that burning steppe again and headed north. At on place I saw an asphalt road turning east and decided to give it a chance. But it soon ended too and the road became a would-be road again. I even lost my way and drove forward until the road completely dissolved in the grass.

Nevertheless finally I ended up in Schänibek at the Kazakh border. One out of the twenty border guards there happened to speak English and when they saw the Ukrainian visa in my passport they asked me if I had seen Americans there. I was slow to understand. No, why? Then it dawned to me that here, cut off from international media, they were exposed only to the Russian version of events, which was that the Americans were coming after them.

Unfortunately they explained to me that this border station was for locals only and I had to go to the next one, which was 400 km away. 400km! I could have crossed the border anywhere here, but what if the police caught me later? So I drove on cross-country towards Ozinki near Oral. This area along the Khazach border turned out to be the loneliest place I have ever been to. No mobile-phone coverage, of course, but also not a single radio station to receive. On the other hand there was a smell of heath in the air so incredibly intense as if the whole country had been parfumed.

I came through a village where your car would sink in the mud would you drive on the road and in one place it was exactly like in a Hollywood slapstick: One meter up, one meter down, one meter up, ...

I crossed into Kazachstan without problems and visited Oral. The road at the border topped even the worst Russian ones: The cars drive not on the road and not beside the road, but on a track ten meters beside the road. Elsewhere I found the roads comparatively new an well-maintained.

BTW: Rooftops in this region tend to be blue. In the city they light up every building and tree with varying colors, that must be the newest trend here.

A bridge crosses the incredibly meandring Oral river and this is the geographical boundary between Europe and Asia.

I am now close to my final destination. I head south, then west, then leave the paved road towards a village named Beysterek and then I am on my own just figuring out the right way following GPS. I almost crash my car in a hidden hole in the grass, but then I stop on a track roughly 500 meters away from 50/50. I walk through the steppe until the GPS shows 50.00000/50.00000.

Here I am, it is hot, I am tired, and there is nothing to be seen except flat steppe till the horizon in all directions.

After some hours I begin the journey back. First driving to the south in direction to Atyrau at the Caspic Sea. I see camels and pipelines along the road, oil money can also be felt in the town, its modern mosques and shopping centers. And a corrupt policeman rips me off.

I drive towards Astrakhan, the potholes become dominant again near the Russian border. The border guards are very excited to see me. I ask why? "Austria Nr. 1" he replies. I am the first Austrian they see? I guess they took me for an Australian.

In Astrakhan one sees beautifully restored church domes, lavish new government buildings, but as I happen to loose my way twice also poorer living quarters.

Next to the west comes the barren country of Kalmykia with Elista as its center and a big Buddhist temple.

In the middle of the steppe near Yashkul suddenly a big monument beside the road: Until here the German army came in World War II, but that was it.

As a contrast the next stop Stavropol is in a fertile and apparently rich agricultural region.

Before continuing to Krasnodar and the Caucasus I want to visit a special village: Privolnoye. That is the corner where Gorbachev was born, who means so much to Europeans. Not so for Russians, wherever I ask they dismiss him, not the smallest trace I can find. I take so many photos that I draw the attention of the police, but as I cannot speak more than "Nemec, tourist" they have to let me go.

In order to avoid the dangerous eastern Ukraine the plan is to visit Crimea and enter Ukraine at the Isthmus of Perekop.

First I have to take the ferry at Kertsch. It became the only connection from Russia and the traffic jam is accordingly, I have to wait for a full 24 hours. That's when you appreciate a mobile home.

Most of Crimea is not too attractive, but the coast near Yalta feels Mediterranian. The city of Sewastopol is a pearl, there was no trace of crisis or discontent, people enjoyed their vacation.

When I wanted to enter mainland Ukraine at Armyansk I ran into trouble. The Ukrainian officials would not let me in, I did not understand why. On the other hand I could not go back either, because my visa allowed me to enter Russia twice and I had done that already. I was stuck in no-man's land, decided to park my car beside the border station, between a Russian and an Ukrainian tank, and went to sleep. I can confirm that such a situation is not the best time to read your foreign office's travel recommendations.

The next morning I got the explanation that I can not cross the border there, because there is no border there. Aha. I argued that if I am already in Ukraine from their point of view then there is no reason not to let me proceed. It did not help. It seems I had entered Ukraine illegally at Kertsch and though no Ukrainian official was there to make my entry legal, I would have to return there.

The Russians turned out to be flexible and just crossed out the stamp in the passport that I had already left Russia. I drove the whole way around the Asow Sea to Rostow and Taganrog to the East Ukrainian borner near Mariupol, exactly the place which I had wanted to avoid. I was told that the road would be safe for now. The Russian border guard was confused by my passport, but accepted it. The Ukrainian official in his completely darkened office - "Lights out!" they immediately ordered - looked at me in disbelief: "What do you do here?? Here is war!" Yep, I now did start to feel uncomfortable and promised to step on the gas to get away.

Already after a few hundred meters I was stopped at a roadblock by fully armed soldiers and the car was searched "Do you have guns?" I looked convincingly civilian and we had some friendly smalltalk, but the same situation repeated ten times during that night. In June there was fighting and in August; I passed through in July.

Along the way my phone charger had broken down and I did not have a map any more. I drove just by using a compass and suddenly noticed that it pointed to north-east. North-east? That is where they are fighting. Whatever I did I ended up driving north-east. In the small village of Urzuf they had a little festival and on a booth a young boy - I think his name was Sachreb or so and he knew everything about Apple - helped me charge the phone. So I found out that I had been on a peninsula which can only be left in north-eastern direction.

I drove to Odessa, found it very charming, then quickly crossed through a sleepy Moldavia and turned south to visit the Danube delta in Romania. I had a quick look at Ceausescu's palace in Bukarest and the touristic region around Brasov, then headed towards Vienna.

I happened to arrive home just in time for the planned birthday party with family.

Later a collegue told me about the Degree Confluence Project, the goal to take photos from all integer crossings of longitude and latitude, and that 50/50 was still "free". I rushed to upload some photos and here it is, it is mine: http://confluence.org/confluence.php?id=9238

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